Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub cites massive psychic trauma as ‘a record that has yet to be made’. This is his way of describing an experience that occurs too quickly or suddenly to be processed, that fails to leave a mark in thought and language but whose presence is felt and expressed in delayed symptomology. Caruth puts it this way: ‘In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.’ It lurks, transmitting down the line, rearranging cells and relationships. When it resurfaces (surprise!) it may or may not appear pathological. Some traumatised individuals are jailed (the addicts, crims and socioeconomically disadvantaged) while others are rewarded (the shame-driven high-achievers).
When it causes havoc we withstand it like bad weather, nursing child-like fantasies (imperceptible sometimes) of rescue by deus ex machina, that magic moment in a play, novel or film where some divine force descends on a seemingly hopeless situation, saving the day. In Ancient Greek theatre this God was literally lowered from the heavens via a device or ‘machine’, which is why it translates from Latin as ‘God out of the machine’. I don’t mean to sound defeatist when I say I have given up waiting for the God out of the machine and that I think the machine is swallowing us all up. It’s true that like Nick Cave I don’t hold with the notion of an interventionist God, but if I did it would be writing. In writing and reading, a touch of salvation is possible, a loosening from the machine, some kind of rising out of it, some kind of not being lonely, the balm of world-making words.
This book had its unwitting beginnings back in 2007 when I wrote about my experience of growing up with violence in a memoir essay titled ‘The Exiled Child’ for Divided Nation, the fifteenth edition of Griffith Review. It was later reprinted in The Age, where some tasteless sub-editor had rebranded it with the punny, cringeworthy title: ‘Home Is Where the Pain Is’. It was shortlisted for the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, up against Frank Moorhouse, Amanda Lohrey and Noel Pearson (Moorhouse won). I had never before had this kind of response to a published piece. I lost count of the number of people who tracked down my email address and wrote to me. And several years later it proved the catalyst for my return to university to undertake a PhD on transgenerational trauma and its literary testimony. I’d already spent years coming to terms with how trauma played out in my own life, and I wanted to understand more about how it worked socially.
In other words, I had been writing a long time before I realised trauma was a grand theme. It’s not a particularly original grand theme since most books, at least so far as poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction are concerned, deal with trauma one way or another. I have no unique claim to it. As trauma tales go there are far worse than mine: in many ways my traumatic experiences have taken place in a privileged context. I’m a white woman from a western, working-middle-class family. I’m not moneyed or financially secure, working as a sessional academic and teacher, one of the many anxious labourers in the rising new class of the precariat, but I am rich in social capital, and have benefited from good fortune. I write about trauma because I don’t know how else to live with it, because I’m still coming to terms with it, still searching for connections, and because I know many others are too.
During my research and reading across continental philosophy, cultural psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralism, one of the works I found most compelling was a book of collected essays by Hungarian–French analysts Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török. Edited and elaborated on by Nicholas Rand, the essays emphasise transgenerational trauma by way of strikingly gothic conceptions. They speak of the ‘crypt’, the ‘phantom’ and ‘psychic tombs’. Abraham and Török’s thinking and writing about trauma are so poetic that reading them inspired a poem in homage:
Writing a Dear John letter while reading Abraham and Török
Dear [insert name here],
You have eaten me
(a me that stands in for another that is).
They call it incorporation.
You swallowed me deep in your belly of
unsobbable sobs, of
unsayable to-be-saids
in your belly of rotting sugar.
You kept me on a chain
like a pet
you starve
at the door of the crypt (of your child mother).
They call you a cryptophore, a poem, a poet.
They dare to rewrite Hamlet and I dare to rewrite you.
Of course the secret,
not just any secret,
not just a secret,
but a tomb, an enclave, a haunting …
your grandmother God in her cardigans
giving you the gaps, giving you the fear,
the wordless passing of the baton
of shame, of shame
and the silence of corpses screaming.
They call it the phantom.
I want out your belly love,
to stand with Hamlet in an ending re-imagined,
in an ending where
only the dead
are buried.
‘Poetry has always been able to utter the will of free will, coming back to the memory of words and extracting its sense and time,’ says Julia Kristeva, the philosopher, literary critic, feminist theorist and psychoanalyst. What does the free will want but to be free, to live? Abraham and Török speak of working-through/mourning/healing as a mysterious but affirming force of psychic life, the result of processing everything from whatever’s in your field of vision (wind-shivery leaves) to your worst nightmare. It can be facilitated by therapy but is by no means limited to it. Reading and writing are among the many currencies in which it moves. This force has worked overtime on my anxiety and panic attacks, addictions, agoraphobia, and many-headed compulsions, which are never only mine. It does what it can under the circumstances and the circumstances aren’t always conducive. It’s alive and pumping, but it gets tired. In short, it’s chalked up some wins and some losses, though neither is absolute.
I spent hours that night at the police station, where I gradually sobered up. There were tests at the hospital, and my father appeared in the hallway, taking his place beside me on one of those hard plastic waiting-room chairs, with a sad, drained look on his face. His presence pained and intimidated me at the best of times, but I was grateful for his way of going quiet, of underplaying, in dramatic situations. What happened that weekend spooked me for months; there was an odd emotional hangover. There were drawn-out legal proceedings. I remember a series of long phone calls with my old friend Renee, talking it through from the Manly flat I was then sharing with my older brother.
I’d first met Renee when I was around twelve or thirteen through my friend Heidi. Heidi was a big-boned, pink-skinned blonde who befriended me on my first day at Glebe Primary School. She was a diabolical child and a treasure, and against the odds she grew up to be – so far as I am able to observe – a functional and accomplished woman. Heidi lived around the corner in a rundown one-bedroom flat, little more than a bedsit, with a drunkard dad who worked in a factory and who, she told me once, was not her real father. It was hard to know what to believe with Heidi, but she didn’t seem to be lying when she said that her mother had committed suicide when Heidi was a baby (the man she grew up with was, apparently, her mother’s partner at the time) and that the bossy old battle-axe who lived down the road was her grandmother. There were a couple of half-sisters around. One was dour and dark-haired with a sour cast of mouth who would have been at home in a Chekhov play; the other was blonde, livelier, and worked in an office somewhere. Heidi had the bedroom, and when he wasn’t at the factory or the pub Heidi’s father, a child-sized elf-like man, slept it off on a filthy-
sheeted single mattress in the lounge room with a small black and white TV blaring from the foot of the bed. On Thursdays, payday, he would come home extra-soused and pass out on the bed with five-, ten-, twenty-dollar bills falling out of his trouser pockets. We’d light-finger them out then take off up to Broadway shops for a Thursday evening shopping spree of whatever took our fancy.
I never did work out how Heidi got to know so many Glebe eccentrics and outsiders, but I mostly got to know them through her. When I was around thirteen or fourteen she took me to a plain double-storeyed house up around Cowper Street. I didn’t know then (or rather I knew in that way of knowing and not understanding) that it was a Sydney ‘colony’ of the Californian cult The Children of God, later renamed The Family. A decade or so later the sect came to public attention amid accusations of serious misconduct, including child abuse and financial mismanagement. I don’t recall being subjected to overt sexual abuse there, but I do remember the promotion and practice of a bizarre evangelistic method called Flirty Fishing, which involved members, often young women, using flirtation and sex to lure new members into the cult.
Heidi also took me to a dilapidated house up on Derwent Street where she introduced me to an old Bukowski lookalike named Jim, who wore Buddy Holly glasses and shuffled around, potbelly protruding from dull-white singlet, long curly grey hairs growing out of his flabby upper arms. Random young women – mostly lesbians or sex workers (or both) – came and went from Jim’s at all hours. I took it at face value, grateful to have somewhere to enjoy Vegemite toast on white bread (not available at my house), bludge smokes for hours on end, kill time, and sometimes con Jim or one of the women into giving us money. There was plenty of sexual innuendo, rumours of porno film screenings at night after we’d gone home, and jokey suggestions that some of the women might have serviced Jim. Still, we viewed it, perversely, as a safe place where we could hang out, smoke and talk freely, away from home. It was there at Jim’s that I first met Renee, though I had no way of knowing then that several years later she’d come back into my life and be my only friend at a time when I desperately needed one.
I was lonely then in a way I’m not lonely now. That’s how I came to be at the bar of a quaint ye olde pub on George Street on a Saturday afternoon drinking with strangers. I’d not long returned to Sydney having fled to London in 1980 at sixteen, determined never to come back to Australia, eager to escape its provincialism, to have a bigger life, to be there rather than here. I had fantasies of becoming an ‘actress’ but that was really my mother’s dream. She’d grown up in the age of the silver screen and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of old Hollywood. Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh and Marilyn Monroe were her favourites and though she dabbled, appearing on Beauty and the Beast during the ’60s, doing small-time theatre shows and working as an extra in ’70s TV shows and films, if she had a missed boat a serious acting career was it. I had fantasies of being someone else, somewhere else, as if being in the glitzy capital at the heart of a dying empire would somehow make me more substantial, more important.
How do I explain the circumstances in which an unaccompanied minor moves 10,560 miles across the planet alone? I can feel myself wanting to protect my dead mother, wanting to explain how headstrong I was, how persuasive I could be, wanting to stress that my pushing wore her down, but the fact is she let me go and she shouldn’t have. Sometimes, when I see fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds – young people the age I was then – I am overcome with sorrow for my young self. As sophisticated as they may appear, whatever their adult veneers, they strike me as child-like and incredibly vulnerable, and I struggle to comprehend how the adults in my life failed to see me that way. To understand something of my mother’s decision, you’d have to understand a mother–daughter dynamic in which on some vital level the tables were turned.
There were several contributing factors to my mother’s poor parental decision-making. She had been stifled by an over-protective mother and longed all her life for freedom from those oppressive demands, so her permissiveness with me was, at least in part, the result of an extreme pendulum swing. She suffered terrible guilt about my childhood, about what I lived through in service to her addiction to pills and troubled men. I knew how to work that guilt to get my way. And despite her feistiness, she was never too far away from a crippling self-doubt that led her to hand over power to those around her, even her own children. This bred in me a sense of false empowerment and gave rise to a deeply ingrained over-responsibility that clashed with wanton irresponsibility in my youthful precociousness. I assumed a position of authority and leadership, especially so far as my destiny and liberties were concerned. As a Cold War baby, I was convinced that nuclear fallout would wipe Europe out in my lifetime and that I needed to get there sooner rather than later, but mostly I went because I had to keep moving, because an imagined somewhere else was always better than the actuality of where I was. And I went because of my first cousin Jake, with whom I was besotted.
A debonair extrovert, Jake had moved to London to pursue a career in film. He seemed so cosmopolitan, even though he was only a few years older than me. His larger-than-life demeanour was a direct consequence of being the son of my Uncle Hugh, my father’s elder brother and a renowned author in his day, and Hugh’s second wife, Phoebe, an Elizabeth Taylor–esque beauty from the Macarthur-Onslow dynasty. Jake was warm and wild and had a to-the-manor-born air about him, but even the glorious Macarthur-Onslow birthright had its roots in a traumatic defeat.
The Macarthurs (historically known by various other spellings) were a distinguished clan in the Scottish Highlands and some make controversial claims that they were descended from King Arthur. The clan reached their zenith of power around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, boasting significant land holdings as the keepers of Dunstaffnage Castle until King James I had the Macarthur clan chief beheaded to keep their influence in check. The execution served its purpose, weakening the clan’s political power base, but the Macarthurs refused to be snuffed out. Come 1746, John Macarthur of Strachur and his seven sons fought as soldiers in the Jacobite army in the ferocious civil war showdown at Culloden Moor. John and one of his brood were slain on the bloody battlefield. The surviving sons scattered in fear for their lives; Alexander Macarthur fled to the West Indies along with numerous other Jacobites, eventually returning to settle in England where his son John – named after Alexander’s fallen father – was born.
John Macarthur grew up to immigrate to Australia with his wife, Elizabeth, who gave birth at sea only to lose the child before nursing John through life-threatening illness aboard the Second Fleet. Thanks to a generous land grant, and on the back of convict labour and amid frontier wars, the Macarthurs became colonial aristocracy after pioneering a world-famous merino wool industry (John Macarthur’s image appeared alongside a ram’s head on the old two-dollar note, and the district is still named after him). Having made his fortune, Macarthur built a majestic Georgian manor called Camden Park House on the traditional lands of the Dharawal people, south of Sydney.
The story of Jake’s forebears is a saga worthy of a melodramatic mini-series, and Alan Atkinson (no relation) has detailed it, at least so far as the public record in Australia is concerned, in a book titled Camden. Suffice to say that Macarthur’s charms, ambition and successes were matched by flourishing flaws, turmoil and scandals; he was instrumental in the infamous Rum Rebellion, an attempted military coup, which resulted in his exile, and in his absence Elizabeth – considered by many, including some within the family, to be the real pioneer – managed the estate and expanded its business interests. After establishing his little empire, John Macarthur died insane and was buried in a family vault shaded by Chinese elms on a humble hill west of the mansion.
Five generations later, Phoebe, the youngest of Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Macarthur-Onslow’s three daughters, became a local celebrity. In a 1950s spread in The Sun-Herald she stands in trousers and lipstick beside her father’s Hornet Moth, w
earing an expression of intelligent determination. She’s only seventeen, already a successful model, and she’s busy taking acting and flying lessons (she went on to become the youngest licensed female pilot in New South Wales). She tells the reporter about her plans to head to Hollywood before she turns eighteen. A ‘Lord Strathallan’ – a Cambridge graduate in Australia to ‘learn the shipping business’ – is noted as her ‘constant escort’. But the film-star plans and hinted marriage to Lord Strathallan don’t come to pass. Instead she meets my uncle, the dashing writer Hugh Atkinson, already married with two children, Damien and Aram. The rest, to twist the adage in on itself, is family history.
Trauma is tenacious in its tendency to transmit intergenerationally, and neither success nor beauty nor money can stop it. My toffy-voiced aunt Phoebe may have seemed to readers of yesteryear gossip columns the personification of Australian faux-royalty, but beneath her socialite glamour, renowned generosity and impressive hosting skills, the brutal losses of Culloden Moor continued to reverberate. And like the son of John Macarthur of Strachur who died at the hands of Hanoverian loyalist troops, Jake lost his battle too young.
I can count the number of times I’ve been to Camden on my fingers, mostly because my father and Hugh lived in different countries for much of my childhood, though they were close all their lives. I do remember a couple of family outings to what was then certified countryside and Jake coming to stay with us for a weekend when I was very young, before my parents divorced. After Hugh’s career as an author took off, the charming couple jetted to the Northern Hemisphere, raising Jake and his sister, Rachael, in Malta, Majorca, Guernsey and London, hobnobbing with luminaries like Peter Finch and Phillip Knightley. (Hugh once warned me off becoming a writer by evoking a memory of watching a tortured Dylan Thomas labouring over troublesome words, though I’m not sure if this bears up: my father says that like all good fiction writers my uncle could be creative with the truth.) In the absence of this worldly branch of the family I heard occasional stories and saw the odd photograph in Mediterranean technicolour.
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